It feels almost like August in April, and so what if glaciers are melting and the sea level rising and scientists predicting vast coastal areas will be underwater within a century? Jon’s Water Ice, which is usually shuttered until after Memorial Day, was doing great business today. I like the novelty.

I’m joking. I don’t even like August weather in August, not in Philadelphia, which is why I’ll be spending the summer in New Zealand, where the bees buzz in cool breezes that blow up from the South Pole with icebergs the size of Rhode Island.

Joking again. I’ll be stuck in Philly, most likely, trying to pay the bills and find an agent for my novel, and writing new short stories, for which I expect a boatload of posthumous praise. Unlike Dorothy Parker, I won’t have Pascal Covici breathing down my neck, but I’ll proceed as if, unless some unknown relative dies and leaves me enough money to make the big move. I so terribly incompetant [sic].

And I’ll try to soldier on with my blog, so as not to disappoint my legion of readers. Anger is a great distraction, and for me there’s nothing more anger-inducing than writing about the rich and powerful crooks who have driven the final nail into the coffin of American democracy. As Atrios wrote today, we’ve lived through a decade in which:

… this country stopped even bothering to pretend to live up to many of its supposed ideals. We go to war and kill lots of people for no good reason, elites have eliminated any accountability for themselves for criminal wrongdoing, we’ve tortured and assassinated people, and the response to massive economic suffering and related criminal fraud has been to give lots of free money to the people who caused it all.

Jon’s is cool because it’s so basic — the only flavors are chocolate, vanilla, cherry and pineapple. And because the girls who work there are sweaty from working hard and stained up to their elbows with what looks like Red Dye No. 2.

In California, we have paletashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleta, which come in tons of flavors — strawberry, banana, coffee, coconut, mango, chocolate, guava, vanilla, pecan, watermelon, cookie dough, tamarind, lime, mamey, etc.
Some are milk-base, others are water-based.They are available year round, for as little as 50 cents each.

Thanks a lot. I’d love to visit New Zealand, and stay for a long while. You got any jobs for unpublished novelists, or journalists? I could herd sheep, too. (That’s what journalists in America do most of the time.)